How to Endure

on post-separation abuse with Kate Hamilton

I first shared the work of Kate Hamilton and her book Mad Wife in this post and received so much positive feedback.

Our conversation focused mainly on her abusive marriage and why it took her so long to leave. But another component of the book is about how painful her life continued to be post-divorce.

I struggle to share these stories. I just shared mine. I want this space to be a place where we talk about the freedom of divorce, the joy of divorce, the possibility of divorce. And it is all those things. But there is also a dark side to divorce, particularly when you divorce someone who the experts call “high-conflict” (others call them “narcissists”).

So when I shared my account of how things seemingly got worse after the divorce was finalized instead of better, I thought of Kate. I knew she’d have something to share with us. And boy did she.

I’ll let her take it from here. If you haven’t already, you can purchase MAD WIFE here. Given that Kate is a pseudonym, it is incredibly challenging for her to do the kind of book promotion that guarantees book sales. So purchasing a book would mean a lot.

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On June 4, 1995, I married a man I loved and trusted. My best friend.

On June 4, 2010—fifteen years later—my lawyer filed a petition to end the marriage that had become a nightmare.

This June 4, 2025—fifteen more years and countless battles later—I will spend what would have been our thirtieth wedding anniversary across a courtroom from this man, this man I left sixteen years ago, this man who damaged me for years before I left and terrorized me and my children for many years after that, this man who has the kind of money that makes the legal system into a weapon, this man who only one year from now will have no legal right to harass me or contact me for any reason because both children will have aged out of our legal agreement. One year. And here I am, preparing again for court, having recently spent over $10,000 before even getting to trial.

How is this possible?

It has become fashionable to write about the glories of divorce as liberation from oppressive or stultifying marriages. I’m a fan of the genre myself; divorce was certainly liberating for me. But you don’t hear nearly so much about the frustrations and even dangers that can lie on that pathway to liberation. Nothing I had ever heard or read about divorce prepared me for the level of vitriol, cruelty, and fear I would experience once I initiated my divorce, and in my worst nightmares I did not imagine that all of it would go on for what is now sixteen years and counting. I was under the impression that the hardest and most crucial part of divorcing was the expense and stress of crafting the terms of the Stipulation of Settlement, and all the cliché battling over stuff and schedules that entails. After that, you just lay in the uncomfortable post-marital bed you had made together. In reality, as Cindy wrote in her recent post, a legal order is worth very little. Outside the courtroom, it primarily functions as guideline or aspiration. If you’re divorced from a particularly selfish and angry person, it can be a dare.

Most overwhelming for me was the feeling that the attacks were entirely unpredictable and would never end. I had no way of making sense of them, being prepared for them, or knowing how to handle them. Looking back, I suspect that this kind of clarity was what my therapist hoped to provide while supporting me through the post-divorce years. Every time I came to her in shock, once again, that my ex was hurting me or my kids in some way; frustrated, once again, that I was unable to logically handle the situation and skip the part where I felt crushed, frightened, furious, or all three, she’d remind me that as long as he had the legal ability to be in my life and my kids’ lives, as long as we had a custodial or financial arrangement, he could harm me and use them to harm me; and that given his past behavior he likely would do so until something else caught his attention. I hoped every new girlfriend would distract him, but each new relationship only provided a brief respite from the onslaught. When my younger son turned 18—ending the most terrifying threat my ex could pose to me or my kids—we celebrated this particular emancipation with champagne and sparklers in the freezing February dark. After I wrote and published a memoir about the myriad ways my ex and the legal system had worked together to demean, oppress, gaslight, and control me and my children, making visible the misogyny that had been enabling our suffering and protecting his right to administer it, I felt I was truly free.

Turns out, I’m not, not yet. But I’m at the point where I can see that attacks that felt endless and unpredictable at the time were not. They would end (in their current form) when our second son graduates college and our financial agreement ends. And they were predictable in that my ex would use nearly every opportunity he had to launch them. I only needed to learn how to recognize when those were coming and brace myself, how to deal with the attacks strategically, and how to endure.

The first surprise was how hard it was to divorce him. He wanted me to stay, and until I was able to retain a lawyer and file a petition for divorce, he could force me to do it. Mediation was out of the question, since I had been unable to get him to work respectfully with me to end the marriage over a year of trying. Since my state did not have no-fault divorce at the time, I was forced to choose “grounds” that the state would recognize as justifying divorce, which meant I had to accuse him of something, which I knew would enrage him (which was part of why it took me so long to do it). I was right. After much agonizing, I settled on “cruel and inhumane treatment”—a fair description of his treatment of me—and when he was served the papers he became apoplectic. He emailed me vitriolic, shaming messages five times that day, and his outrage at what he considered a slanderous accusation fueled more hateful and threatening emails for years. Accomplishing the actual divorce was strikingly quick and simple in comparison to getting to the point of initiating it—but only because I gave up a lot that I “should” have fought for.

As soon as we were divorced I began to realize that all those carefully drawn up and debated documents were open to interpretation and practically unenforceable. I’d request that he reimburse me for his share of something the kids needed—clothing, school supplies—and he’d inform me that it was covered by the support he was paying me. Did I want to initiate another expensive court battle to argue about what exactly was covered by “incidental expenses”? I did not. So he refused to buy those things for the kids—culminating in my son calling me from his dad’s house to say he had no pants to put on and his grandparents were about to arrive, could I please deliver him some clothes that fit? After that, I routinely bought enough clothes for both houses and gave half to my ex. When he occasionally paid for something he deemed my responsibility—like giving our son money to go skiing with a friend on “my” custodial day, without consulting me—he simply withheld that amount when he reimbursed me for what I’d already paid for the kids’ doctors, lessons, etc (all of which I paid, because I took them to all these appointments to make sure they got there). When the kids left for school from his house, he refused to give them lunch money. Etc. Were these things injurious to the kids, unfair to me, and frankly reprehensible parental behavior? Absolutely. Could I stop him without going to court? Absolutely not.

He did as he pleased regarding custody as well. He hadn’t even fought me for primary physical custody and initially seemed content with his alternate weekends and Wednesday nights, so I entered the post-divorce years without concerns about custody. But I quickly found that the kids would provide the most constant and painful opportunities for him to demonstrate his control over all of us. He ignored our carefully worked-out agreements about drop-off and pickup times, appeared unannounced in my driveway to whisk the kids away without my consent (having already excited them about some adventure), and kept them at his house on my custodial days for a variety of reasons, sometimes lying about those reasons. Occasionally he asked my permission for these sudden changes, putting me in the position of willingly giving up custodial time or preventing my children from seeing their grandparents or attending some cool thing he’d planned for them on my weekend. Over and over he “asked” me to completely pull apart our complicated schedule so he could sync up his custodial weekends with those of his new girlfriend, or of his band of divorced dads. I later found out that on at least one of those custodial weekends he’d fought for, he and his girlfriend had gone out of town and he’d instructed my sons to “find sleepovers” rather than stay with me (and yes, my custodial agreement does contain that clause requiring him to give me the chance to have my own kids before asking someone else to look after them). Another year, he took my kids to visit his new girlfriend in the city over Mother’s Day weekend. When I protested, he suggested I could drive the two hours to pick them up Sunday morning if I wanted to. When I asked him to just drop them at my house when they got back to town Sunday afternoon, he said he would, but did not, and I did not see them that Mother’s Day.

He forgot to take them to birthday parties, music lessons, sports games. He forgot to pick them up from after-school activities. He forgot to feed them (which I know because a good friend of mine who lived in his neighborhood told me of the many times my kids arrived at her house from his and mentioned they had not eaten anything all day. She started keeping a massive bowl of snacks on the counter just for my perpetually hungry kids).

On his many custodial days when he worked late, he forbade them from taking the bus from school to my house and forbade me from picking them up from his. Once I dropped by his house after 8 pm on a Friday to drop something off for one of them and found them glued to the TV in a dark, empty house, surrounded by crumpled snack bags. They didn’t know when he’d be home. I’d been home all afternoon.

All of these things were neglectful of the kids, mean to me, and selfish of him. Many of them were in blatant violation of our custodial agreement, and all of them were morally repugnant. But after lodging my protests I allowed them, because the alternative was…what? Digging into a battle that I would always lose? This is a man who will never stop till he gets what he wants, who will be as ugly as it takes. Should I have reclaimed custodial days from him to get back the time I’d lost with my kids, thus giving him the ammunition to launch at me in court? He would have happily done that. Threatening me occasionally with “seeking 50/50 custody” was his most effective bullying method.

Meanwhile, early in the divorce process, I’d read books in which experts stated that the worst thing a divorced parent could do was denigrate the other parent in front of the kids. Kids identify with their parents, the books said, so to harm a kid’s image of their parent is to harm them. Then there was the fact that, as my ex’s treatment of my children went from neglectful to abusive and I began to research what it would take to limit my children’s exposure to them, I heard from every direction—lawyers, therapists, doctors, school psychologists—that I must under no circumstances do or say anything that could be construed as alienating my children from their dad. I’ve written about the unbelievable injustice and trauma of the custody trial extensively in Mad Wife and won’t repeat all that here.

Suffice it to say that for many reasons—some of which were only suspicions, but that later experience proved to be accurate—I chose to swallow my rage at my ex’s nearly constant flouting of our legal agreement, his neglect of our kids when I lived five minutes away and was happy to take care of them. What I discovered, after all that initial expensive haggling over the Stipulation of Settlement, was that he could do almost anything he wanted—not just because I was loathe to get drawn into an expensive and incredibly stressful court battle, which eventually happened, but because I would likely lose any custodial battle he started: once we were in court over custody, the judge didn’t give a fig about any of his neglect or abuse of our kids, and I had to withdraw my own petition to reduce his visitation to avoid losing custody myself. For the next three years, until my younger son turned 18, we had to find a way to endure the original custodial arrangement that my son and I both abhorred while trying not to provoke a newly empowered, abusive father into launching his own custody battle in retribution.

That is to say: the shocking problem is not just that these tediously, expensively negotiated legal documents do not protect women and are not enforceable outside court. It’s that they also empower men, who are free to thwart them outside court and use the legal system to revise them as they see fit. These documents guarantee nothing and are never fixed. They are always open to distortion and rewriting.

I was more successful in court on financial matters, mostly because my ex made so much more money that I do—three times my salary when we divorced; six times my salary a few years later—that the judge raised his support payment when I finally got the courage to ask him to. But while my original lawyer assured me that asking for an adjustment of support and health insurance payments would be simple and not require her help, I found the opposite to be true. We were in court about financial matters for years, and each new trial brought a new onslaught outside of court: near-obsessive emails and texts in which my ex shamed, denigrated, threatened, and attacked me, trying to bully me into submission when he knew he couldn’t win in court. So even when the legal system benefitted me, using it required me to pay the price of enduring ongoing abuse that arrived by text, email, and phone, infiltrating the life I had carefully built to keep my ex out.

This is a depressing story that many women will relate to, so I want to be clear that it has a happy ending. Perhaps the happiest part is that there is an ending; your ex can’t be in your life and damage you forever. I’m angry to be dragged back to court again. I resent the massive waste of money and time I’m being forced to spend to defend myself and my child, again. But this time is different. I don’t experience every letter from the court or my lawyer as an existential threat, because this time I can see the end of the nightmare: May 1, 2026. It shines on the near horizon like a beacon. I know I can get from here to there.

I’m not sure it would have helped me to keep this date in mind a decade ago—does it alleviate current pain to know your suffering will end in a decade? But I know it would have helped me to have clarifying ways of thinking about what felt like endless, unpredictable, traumatic suffering, and strategic ways of dealing with it. So here are my tips for negotiating the post-divorce years—all the things I wish someone had told me while I was going through them. Some of these will only apply to the most contentious divorces. But then, if you’re reading this, that probably describes yours.

1. Make sure your ex is paying support through your state’s support collection unit (SCU). I declined to use SCU services from the start because I hadn’t wanted to piss him off further—you can see how well that worked. I came to regret this almost immediately, since he began withholding support payments to bully or punish me. Routing his payments through the SCU years later brought immense relief and protection. It’s your right to use SCU and all you have to do is ask.

2. Get to know the person who’s handling your case at the SCU. Should problems arise with payments, they can give you information about your ex’s payments and employment situation that you can’t get anywhere else. They can also file a violation petition on your behalf if your ex stops paying.

3. Find the least upsetting way to communicate with your ex, and insist upon it.

   This tip is especially important if you’re dealing with a narcissist determined to keep you hooked into their life; legal and custodial issues provide them endless ways of doing that. Email has the advantage of allowing you to choose when you read it, but the disadvantage of allowing your ex to deliver long rants you have to read through to find pertinent information. Texting limits the content but erupts into your life on your phone. Phone calls can be upsetting if you have a contentious relationship with your ex, but when things were worst between us I insisted on the phone, because my ex would get so angry he’d hang up on me, actually limiting my exposure to him. Whatever works best for you, know it’s your right to choose that form of communication. Should you wind up in a custody trial, you might need to show that you’re reachable, but you don’t need to show that you’ve responded to your ex’s every manic attempt to invade your life. Relatedly—

4. Teach your ex to wait for you to reply to them. Your ex cannot expect or force you to be at their beck and call. Respond to their text or email in a time frame that’s appropriate for the issue at hand. For anything short of a kid-related emergency, do not reply immediately, even if your ex is blowing up your phone demanding your response. If you’ve been trained by your ex to give them attention whenever they ask or bully you for it, this technique is especially important. I found it very hard to do for a long time—the training process is painful to endure—but I got better with practice. Now that the kids are older, I never reply to my ex the same day he emails me and I trained him away from texting altogether by ignoring his texts. Doing this was life-changing!

5. Set your email account to deliver all messages from your ex to a folder where you will not see them until you choose to. Find the best time to do that—for me it was after (sometimes while) meeting with my therapist, or after yoga. And if you’re worried for your privacy or safety from your ex, move the rest of your emailing to a secure program (such as Proton mail).

6. Keep communication short, emotionally neutral, impersonal, and polite.

   The less emotional and personal content you give, the less your ex can use communication between you to pull you into their emotional orbit. When your ex comes at you with emotionally provocative or accusatory messages, ignore that content completely. Stick to the necessary facts pertaining to kids or finances. And remember that any communication between you could appear some day in court.

7. Keep excellent records—of all expenses and payments for your kids, communication (texts, emails, voicemails) between you and your ex (and with your kids, if you suspect abusive behavior by your ex), of your calendars showing your kid-related activities and when your kids were with you, of all your children’s complaints about their time at your ex’s house.

8. Pick your battles. If you’re dealing with someone who will use every opportunity to bait and hurt you, your choice is between being in constant conflict for years (and likely losing most of the time) and reserving your energy for the most important fights. You will learn quickly which battles are worth fighting. For me, those were the ones that involved some possible significant harm to my children.

9. Learn how to talk with your kids about your ex’s neglect or mistreatment of them. This is a big and complicated subject for another post. But if you suspect emotional or physical abuse, there’s a lot you need to know about how to proceed so you can protect yourself and your children not just from their other parent, but from the court system who is likely to award custody to the abusive parent. My memoir Mad Wife might be a helpful place to start.

10. If you get to the point where a petition to change custody is necessary and your lawyer or therapist hesitates, ask them why and believe them. Experienced lawyers and therapists know what you likely do not, which is that however much evidence you have of your ex’s poor treatment of your children, your odds of winning a custody battle are not good. That does not mean you shouldn’t file a petition to change custody anyway. Though I was forced to withdraw my petition rather than risk losing custody to an abusive parent, I know now that taking that battle to court was crucial and helpful in many unexpected ways—again, a subject for another post perhaps. But go into such a battle with your eyes wide open.

11. Build and maintain your own support system, ideally containing people who understand what you’re going through, as well as a good therapist. I didn’t know a soul who’d had any experiences like mine while I was going through my divorce or the many terrible years after. This Substack is an incredible resource and would have made a world of difference to me! Once you’re through your worst years, do your best to support others going through it.

12. Don’t beat yourself up for feeling the same fear, sadness, stress, or impotence with every single battle. Feel what you feel, and know it’s normal to feel these things when someone is harming you. Also, know that you can still be strong and fight the fight while feeling these things.

I don’t regret any fight I fought, no matter the outcome. I don’t regret the things I gave up when I chose not to fight. I know why I made each choice and that I did my best for my kids and for myself every time. Now that I feel relatively safe and can see the end of my own post-divorce nightmare, perhaps the one thing I wish I could have done better is this: I should have been kinder to myself and seen my suffering not as a failure of will—ridiculous notion!—but as evidence that someone was hurting me. I wish I could have seen myself then as I see myself now: a total badass who has been pummeled, sore, and aching while fighting back for over sixteen years.

My therapist also pointed out all those years ago that my ex’s attacks probably would not end with our legal entanglement. If he continued to want to punish me, or keep me hooked into his life and psyche, he could find ways of doing that—likely using our kids. By now though, I think my kids understand more about their dad’s treatment of us and my well-deserved aversion to him more than they want to talk about, not because I’ve said horrible things about their dad to them—which I never did—but because as they’ve gotten older, they’ve become increasingly able to see things as they are. So perhaps my last tip is simply this: in the thick of things, cast your gaze to the horizon of your truly post-divorce life. What feels endless and immutably unbearable is changing every day. Your children are growing up and becoming more independent and less manipulable. You’re slowly approaching the end of your legal connection to your tormentor, the day when you can, as I plan to gleefully do in one short year, never speak or respond to that person again.

Until then, remember there are parts of yourself and your life that your ex can never touch, that the court battles cannot touch, and these are worth more than the money you might lose or the rage or impotence or sadness you might feel, all of which are fleeting while you are being forged anew by the hell you’re moving through and will abide.

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Thank you Kate for these heartfelt and wise words. Again, you can order her book here. You can read our original conversation about marriage here. If you know someone who would benefit from this information, this post is free so share it. And as always, if you find value in this work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.